Italy Indicts 10 Over '80 Jet Crash

Old Suspicions Of Missile Attack, Cover-up Revived

ROME — Itavia Airline's Flight 870 from Bologna to Palermo was already two hours late when it took off at 6:08 on a balmy June evening in 1980.

Less than an hour into the flight, the jetliner, a DC-9 with 81 passengers and crew aboard, disappeared from radar screens. Its last message from the pilot to ground control was a routine, "We're about to start our descent."

The next day, rescue teams found the wreckage scattered over a wide area of the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica, about 50 miles off the northern coast of Sicily. There were no survivors.

For 19 years, the cause of the crash has remained unresolved, shrouded in conspiracy theories and cover-ups. Now a new chapter in the mystery of Flight 870 is being written.

The Italian government this week indicted four retired Italian air force generals and six senior military intelligence officers for treason, charging them with conspiring to keep silent and destroying evidence of the true cause of the tragedy.

It appears that the most likely and long-suspected explanation--that the plane was caught in a crossfire between NATO warplanes, possibly American-piloted, and Libyan aircraft--will finally have its day in court.

The wide area over which the crash debris and the bodies were spread led investigators to conclude almost immediately that there had been some kind of explosion.

A bomb was one possibility, but no group or person came forward to claim responsibility. Perhaps some mechanical malfunction had caused the explosion. Investigators pursued that theory for a while but came up empty.

Within a few months, a new theory emerged: The plane had been shot down by a missile, possibly two missiles. The Italian military and NATO denied any involvement.

Bolstering that theory was the discovery, three weeks after the incident, of a Libyan MiG-21 that had crashed into a remote Calabrian mountainside about 200 miles from where the DC-9 went down.

The initial autopsy report indicated the Libyan pilot had died several weeks before. But that report was overruled by a military investigation, which concluded that the pilot had died of heart attack the day he was found and that this was the cause of the crash. The body was quickly shipped back to Libya.

On the night of the Ustica crash, the alarm for the missing airliner was first sounded by an Italian air defense radar station in Sicily, but when investigators sought the radar tracking tape they found that the crucial segment recording the last eight minutes of the ill-fated flight had been "unfortunately" erased.

Italy's military secrecy act blocked further investigation.

There were other signs of a cover-up. The Italian government made no serious effort to recover the wreckage from the sea floor until 1986, six years after the crash, when about 90 percent of the aircraft was brought up. By that time, parts of the wreckage recovered immediately after the crash had disappeared. Meanwhile, Itavia, a privately owned domestic carrier, went bankrupt.

Pressured by relatives of the victims, one special commission after another looked into the matter, only to run into a stone wall of official obfuscation.

The most persuasive evidence came from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Britain's Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment. Based on a study of the wreckage and radar data obtained from civil air authorities, both agencies concluded that the DC-9 had been blown out of the sky by a missile. The agencies ruled out the possibility of a bomb on the plane.

Those findings were published in 1986 and they triggered a new panel of experts to look into the Ustica crash. Three years later, the panel concluded that, indeed, the DC-9 had been hit by a missile. A few months later, two of the panel's five experts changed their minds and said it was a bomb.

That's when Rome magistrate Rosario Priore took over the case. Ten years later, with the help of another panel of experts, he has produced a 3,000-page report concluding that the DC-9 was caught "in a warlike scenario" as NATO and Libyan jets skirmished over the Mediterranean.

For Daria Bonfietti, an Italian parliamentarian who lost a brother in the crash, the findings represented a measure of vindication after a long struggle.

"In our country 81 innocent people lost their lives and little by little this event was forgotten. Today this long chapter can be closed," said Bonfietti, who heads the Ustica Victims Association.

She said that Italy's NATO allies had withheld critical information and that getting to the truth was "above all a matter of national dignity."

The most likely scenario, according to the report, is that a plane from one side or the other tried to use the civilian jet as a shield to hide from enemy radar. Several warplanes from each side appear to have been involved in the skirmishing.